Google called a bandwidth hog

Google has fought back at an accusation that it's an Internet bandwidth hog.

The claim was made by Scott Cleland, president of Precursor, which is a research outfit with links to US telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon.

The study, which backs the telecoms' calls for a two-tiered Internet, claimed that Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.

It estimates that Google accounted for 16.5 per cent of all US consumer Internet traffic this year and predicts that number will jump to 25 per cent in 2009 and 37 per cent in 2010.

Cleland alleges that Internet connections could be made more affordable for everyone if Google paid its fair share of the Internet's cost.

Cleland said it's ironic that Google, the largest user of Internet capacity, pays the least relative to its use to fund the Internet's cost, demonstrating that Americans still have not mastered what the word irony means.

He added that it was "even more ironic" that the company poised to profit most from more broadband deployment expects the American taxpayer to pick up its skyrocketing bandwidth tab. Clearly he was channelling Alanis Morrissette when he wrote the piece.

Google pointed out that, since Cleland is paid huge wodges of cash by the telephone industry, he was about as neutral as the Vichy government during the Second World War. Besides, a quick search would find that the real meaning of the word ironic reveals that it has nothing to do with spoons.

A spokesGoogle said that consumers voluntarily choosing to use its applications are actually using their own broadband bandwidth, not Google.

To say that Google somehow 'uses' consumers' home broadband connections shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet actually works.

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